George Walker At Suez | Page 4

the world's surface that I, George Walker, of Friday
Street, London, have ever visited, Suez in Egypt, at the head of the Red
Sea, is by far the vilest, the most unpleasant, and the least interesting.
There are no women there, no water, and no vegetation. It is

surrounded, and indeed often filled, by a world of sand. A scorching
sun is always overhead; and one is domiciled in a huge cavernous hotel,
which seems to have been made purposely destitute of all the comforts
of civilised life. Nevertheless, in looking back upon the week of my life
which I spent there I always enjoy a certain sort of triumph;--or rather,
upon one day of that week, which lends a sort of halo not only to my
sojourn at Suez, but to the whole period of my residence in Egypt.
I am free to confess that I am not a great man, and that, at any rate in
the earlier part of my career, I had a hankering after the homage which
is paid to greatness. I would fain have been a popular orator, feeding
myself on the incense tendered to me by thousands; or failing that, a
man born to power, whom those around him were compelled to respect,
and perhaps to fear. I am not ashamed to acknowledge this, and I
believe that most of my neighbours in Friday Street would own as
much were they as candid and open-hearted as myself.
It is now some time since I was recommended to pass the first four
months of the year in Cairo because I had a sore-throat. The doctor may
have been right, but I shall never divest myself of the idea that my
partners wished to be rid of me while they made certain changes in the
management of the firm. They would not otherwise have shown such
interest every time I blew my nose or relieved my huskiness by a slight
cough;--they would not have been so intimate with that surgeon from
St. Bartholomew's who dined with them twice at the Albion; nor would
they have gone to work directly that my back was turned, and have
done those very things which they could not have done had I remained
at home. Be that as it may, I was frightened and went to Cairo, and
while there I made a trip to Suez for a week.
I was not happy at Cairo, for I knew nobody there, and the people at the
hotel were, as I thought, uncivil. It seemed to me as though I were
allowed to go in and out merely by sufferance; and yet I paid my bill
regularly every week. The house was full of company, but the company
was made up of parties of twos and threes, and they all seemed to have
their own friends. I did make attempts to overcome that terrible British
exclusiveness, that noli me tangere with which an Englishman arms
himself; and in which he thinks it necessary to envelop his wife; but it
was in vain, and I found myself sitting down to breakfast and dinner,
day after day, as much alone as I should do if I called for a chop at a

separate table in the Cathedral Coffee-house. And yet at breakfast and
dinner I made one of an assemblage of thirty or forty people. That I
thought dull.
But as I stood one morning on the steps before the hotel, bethinking
myself that my throat was as well as ever I remembered it to be, I was
suddenly slapped on the back. Never in my life did I feel a more
pleasant sensation, or turn round with more unaffected delight to return
a friend's greeting. It was as though a cup of water had been handed to
me in the desert. I knew that a cargo of passengers for Australia had
reached Cairo that morning, and were to be passed on to Suez as soon
as the railway would take them, and did not therefore expect that the
greeting had come from any sojourner in Egypt. I should perhaps have
explained that the even tenor of our life at the hotel was disturbed some
four times a month by a flight through Cairo of a flock of travellers,
who like locusts eat up all that there was eatable at the Inn for the day.
They sat down at the same tables with us, never mixing with us, having
their separate interests and hopes, and being often, as I thought,
somewhat loud and almost selfish in the expression of them. These
flocks consisted of passengers passing and repassing by the overland
route to and from India and Australia; and had I nothing else to tell, I
should delight to describe all that I watched of